I need some help with a screwed up computer

ben huebscher

I have a Dual 1.25 GHz PowerMac G4 with 2 Gigs of Ram and over 300 GBs of Hard Disk and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card so hardware is not an issue but my WindowServer continues to crash. _The symptoms are very odd... expose stops working as well as command-tabing between applications and the dock stops working (I keep it on hide and it just stops coming up). _Everything else works fine but the computer becomes increasingly unresposive until i have to use the power buttom to force a shutdown... the shutdown menu never works. _It used to be that I could open up Activity Monitor and force quit the dock but that doesn't even work now...



any help?

gardenofearthlydelights

- Repair permissions? (Disk utility)

- Install/Archive OS again?

- Sacrifice chicken?



Did you install Samba, or are you using the normal Windows Sharing? Did you modify any *.conf files?

aslan^

There should be a hardware diagnostics CD included with your mac. Try booting from that and giving everything (RAM, filesystem, logic boards etc) a thorough check. If no problems then you should seriously consider a reinstall.



Your system shouldnt degrade in this way (unless maybe you spend a lot of time logged in as root playing with system files) so it could quite possibly be components failing sporadically, or bad sectors on your disk, maybe crappy video drivers. Run the diagnostic CD a couple of times in succession to try and strain it a little.



If no hardware is to blame then you should first do a sytem update then upgrade your video drivers as well as drivers for other non-mac hardware and if that doesnt help you will have to reinstall your OS (after backing up your stuff of course), speaking of which... what OS are you running ?



Disregard all of this if repairing permissions fixed everything... and let us know.



Oh and I just noticed your 300 gigs of hard disk space, are you using software RAID ? does anyone know if this could cause problems ?